Your post is wrong for a lot of reasons.
First hull heals are larger then shield heals. So if " the incoming damage to hull is too great for 2 hull heals to keep up with." then the damage is also to great for shields to keep you alive. Next

" Hulls dont have anything equivalent to that. Its only got a 3X bigger HP pool, no natural regen to speak of and no means to rotate damage around as hull is just the hull."
Wrong on both counts. First there is a equivalent to that as I have something like 20 to 30% resistance with zero gear. Also hulls have natural regen and ways to boost it like giveing all your boffs leadership. Each one stacks towards natural hull regen. You can have more than x3 bigger hitpoint pool I think my ship is around x6 hitpoints over shields and I have similar resistance to shields with my hull around 60% to 70% resistance and far larger heals.

Armor stacking does work, you are wrong. I can tank a ship with zero shields and just armor. You keep mentioning shields take half damage from torpedo's but so does a decent hull setup. All torpdeos that hit me doo well under half damage. Only instead of having 10k hitpoints I have 60k ish. I can take a 100k hit and live while a shield tanker dies in 1 shot.

Armor tanking is superior to shield tanking both from a math point of view and in game. (at least with cruisers, not so sure about Escorts)

I'm not saying it doesnt mitigate damage. I'm saying that you cant expect to hull tank because said hull resists are too small compared to the huge amount of damage thats coming in.

A photon torpedo generally crits for around 10,000 damage. Thats a single torpedo fired at you with no damage boost. Take 39.2% off that. The armor saves you from 3920 damage. You take 6080 to the hull.

That is a LOT of damage. A ship with lots of hull HP has around +-~ 50k hull. It would take 8 such torpedos to destroy such a ship.

If you look at your combat spam, when you're getting fired upon you rarely receive just 1 torpedo to the hull at a time.. you get showered with them either from multiple ships firing at you or from a torpedo volley thrown your way. Bear in mind also that if you lower your speed to turn or get held by a tractor for the second or two the torpedo hits you , your defense rating is signficantly reduced which almost guarantees a critical hit.

Shields have innate damage reduction to kinetic damage (almost 50% if memory serves me right) can be rotated by turning ship or equalizing shields. Yes, hull heals are larger than shield heals but the damage to the hull is also significantly higher so in a % based the shield and hull heals are not that different.

Federation cruisers and science ships generally fly with something between 12 to 15k shields PER FACING. If you keybind equalize shields to a lot of your constant-click keyboard actions (like turn ship, fire weapons, etc) you literally force anyone attackign you to have to munch through 12-15k shield x4 (48-60k shields) which is precisely the same range (if not more) of hitpoints heavily hulled ships have.

See above. Also, the hull natural regen only kicks in outside of combat. If you had noticed, while in combat your crew's natural regen bonus cuts to a single digit percent. A few torpedo hits to the shields and your crew is mostly dead or incapacitated (since torpedo kills crews based on a percentage not even the 4000-crew klingon carrier has people alive after a volley hits it). Dont believe me? Get all your leadership stacked ship in a challenge with anyone to test it. Unequip your ship shields and let the other guy drop you to 20% hull. Equip crew survival modules if you want to see how insignificant the crew-based hull regen is while you're under red alert.

Of course it works. My point is the incoming damage is too high and too constant for your hull heal timers to compensate for. The resists you speak of achieving are only done through abilities like polarize hull and brace for impact (and others) stacking on top of the resists your armor modules give you. The hard cap for any resists is 75%.

The bulk of your resists are on a timer. Most of them have 30 to 45 second timers and the resist itself functions only for 10 to 15 seconds average. Your hull heals also give resists for a timer shorter than their re-use timer is.

The point is.. if you slip up on keeping your resists up you're toast. Hull does not have a secondary means of regaining hitpoints whereas shields have the advantage of equalizing/rotating them and their regen is significantly increased by almost all shield heal abilities. If the shield is dropped there is still the hull plus the armor resists it has from abilities and modules. Hull tanking by itself is not a good idea. A hybrid shield-focused with armor-as-backup tank works a lot better.

Hull resistance are as high as shields resistance so I disagree. You say a Photon crits fro 10,000 after 60% to 70% resistance that's next to zero damage. SIF alone is on a 15second timer and gives 55reistance which is more then enough to tank that type of damage. Plus only what 11% of shots are crit?


"Also, the hull natural regen only kicks in outside of combat. If you had noticed, while in combat your crew's natural regen bonus cuts to a single digit percent."
I see triple digit outside combat and 60% in combat without buffing it up which you can do. Plus with the borg set I have a passive 2500 hitpoints per second hull heal that keeps activating. Or you can use the other set that gives hull resistance for the incoming damage type that hits you. That 2500 hitpoints per second is as good as if not better then any natural shield regen.



"My point is the incoming damage is too high and too constant for your hull heal timers to compensate for. The resists you speak of achieving are only done through abilities like polarize hull and brace for impact (and others) stacking on top of the resists your armor modules give you. The hard cap for any resists is 75%. "

I disagree and think you are wrong, in fact I know you are as I have been challenged many times in PvP 1v1 to prove myself. While hull tanking no one has managed to kill me 1v1 since the skill revamp. I have 47.3% resistance and 50% Kinetic without buffs. With buffs I stay around 60% to 70%. Add that with the 10k and 20k hull heals around every 15seconds and I can tank way more than any shield tank. How can you say damage is too high and too constant for your hull heals? The way I see it any damage that is too high and to constant for hull heals is too high and too constant for shield heals. I can also balance my shields so any torps lose damage before hitting my hull.




" Most of them have 30 to 45 second timers and the resist itself functions only for 10 to 15 seconds average. Your hull heals also give resists for a timer shorter than their re-use timer is."
The main hull heals I use are Engineering Team and Sif both lowered down to 15seconds each. Sif gives 55% resistance and is pretty much constantly up.

EDIT: I just tried removed my shields went into mission with ships hitting me with te hardness set to Elite. Went AFK and my passive hul regen kept me alive with zero buffs or active hull heals. Still at 61.1% hull regen as I am typeing this and hull hitpoints at 96% jumping back up to 100% every so often. Going to get 4 crusiers on me next and see what happens, will edit in here.

EDIT: Hull dropped to 20% after a long time but worked its way back up to 60% without me doing anything, passive hull regen dropped to 44% so far.

How do you get your resistance up to 47.3% in general? Using three neutronium mk XI blues I can only get mine up to the aforementioned 39.2%. Would four consoles really make that significant of a difference? Or are you doing something else?

Im' running something very similar, HE2 + ET2 + A2SiF3

From memory my Aux is 47/25, with 9 in WCE, 9 in WCP and 0 in Aux Per.

I'm seeing 4250ish at 47 Aux and 7500ish at 125 Aux.

3 XI blues give me 42.9% overall resistance with 45.5% Kinetic. I have Starship Threat Control, Armor reinforcements and Hull Plating all maxed out. I assume our diffrence is due to Starship Threat Control.

what is the following below?

aux to sif ?
aux to ID?

I'm sorry since I'm not familiar with these terms.

Thanks

Aux to SIF (or Just SIF) = Auxiliary to Structural Integrity Field
Aux to ID = Auxiliary to Inertial Dampeners.